‘There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with seeing something clearly for the first time,’ says Margot White of ‘Cruelest Pill’, the lead single from her forthcoming album. She began writing it during a period when she was questioning beliefs she had held about herself, love and the relationships people form. What interests her is the effect a realisation can have on events that are already over. ‘I think some of the most difficult realizations in life are the ones that fundamentally alter our understanding of the past,’ she says. It’s easy enough to see why a change of mind might bring relief. The grief is harder to account for. A belief can have offered a sense of continuity for years, helping you understand the decisions you made and the people you trusted. Giving it up can leave you with a better explanation for some of those decisions and a fresh set of questions about others. White gives that unsettled period a place in the story, at a point where there’s usually pressure to say what you’ve learnt and get on with putting it into practice.
White calls that moment of recognition ‘both devastating and liberating’ and says, ‘I wanted the song to inhabit that emotional space.’ The distinction between the two feelings can be difficult to maintain when you’re the one experiencing them. The relief may come from having words for something you’ve struggled to explain, even as those words oblige you to rethink assumptions you once found reassuring. There’s a tendency, when we look back, to ask what we should have known sooner. It can be a punishing question, especially when it treats trust as a lapse in judgement. A more generous one might be what made sense to us then. It allows for the possibility that the person we used to be had reasons we can still understand, even if we’d make a different choice now. That is part of the interest of White’s account. She’s concerned with what happens to your idea of yourself when a conviction gives way, and with the difficulty of extending some sympathy to the self that held it.
‘Cruelest Pill’ comes from the same body of writing as White’s forthcoming poetry collection, ‘Pit’. ‘I’m fascinated by the idea of art as a form of alchemy,’ she says, describing her interest in what can be made from difficult experiences. Alchemy suggests a change in the material itself. Writing can also change what a person is able to do with that material. On the page, you can give a thought more room than it would ordinarily get in conversation. You can follow it for a while, see where it takes you and return to it later with a different emphasis. The fact that White has worked with this material across a song and a poetry collection leaves room for more than one reading of it, including her own. There is something quietly practical in that. People can feel under pressure to settle on a single account of a consequential period, especially once they’ve told it to others. A writer has a reason to keep looking. The passage that seemed incidental on a first reading may be the one she returns to when she sits down to write something else.
‘For me, releasing “Cruelest Pill” feels like an act of reclamation,’ White says. Making work from a private experience gives an artist some say in which part of it becomes public. Audiences can be curious about the events behind a song, especially when its writer has spoken about a personal upheaval. The temptation is to treat the particulars as a way of settling what the work means. White’s account of ‘Cruelest Pill’ gives us a different object of attention. She talks about the difficulty of giving up an old understanding of the world, a feeling that can reach well beyond romantic relationships. Someone reconsidering a friendship or the role they’ve played in their family might recognise it. So might someone coming to terms with the fact that an ambition they organised their life around has stopped mattering to them. Each can involve the awkward discovery that something you freely chose, perhaps for very good reasons, has become hard to imagine choosing again.
White says she wanted to make something that ‘feels like a revelation or awakening, liberating and honest but also potentially unexpected’. That last word leaves room for a response we tend to underestimate. You can know that a change was necessary and still be surprised by what you miss about the way things were. Among the things you miss might be the ease of having an explanation ready, or the confidence with which you once spoke about the future. Those losses can be difficult to admit because they sound like a wish to go back. Sometimes they’re simply part of understanding what it cost to move on. In putting grief alongside relief, ‘Cruelest Pill’ allows the earlier account of your life to have mattered, even after you’ve found reason to revise it.